1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the technical field of Internet-provided software services, and pertains more particularly to a system enabling persons who post content in various on-line venues to track, analyze, manage, optimize and predict performance of their posted content and to compare their posted content to content posted by others in a more granular and insightful manner than provided by the services that make the posted content available to the public.
2. Description of Related Art
People post content in on-line venues for a wide variety of purposes. Some postings are for entertainment, some are for education, some are to promote an idea, a philosophy, or a political position, and a great many are by for-profit businesses to promote salable goods and services. Means for gauging effect of posting content is closely related to the nature of the poster and the posting. In the case of political promotion, polling and election results may tell the tale. In the case of religion, new converts may indicate the effect of posted content. In the case of a video blogger (vlogger), viewing of the actual content is a primary measure. In the case of for-profit enterprises one way to gauge the effect of content posted for promotional purposes is to track sales statistics. If a business promotion is producing desired results, then sales of the promoted goods or services should increase, and revenue should also increase. But this conventional gauge is a macroscopic approach, and suffers from many problematic issues. Emergence of large online platforms that enable posting of content such as Facebook™ and YouTube™ for example, frequently command high user activity, and therefore have attracted marketers who now incorporate such platforms into their marketing strategies and execution plans.
With a continuing accelerated growth of such platforms there is a growing need to understand data from such platforms. These content platforms have also become an increasingly competitive environment and thus, creating the need for tools that enable a competitive advantage. As the volume of data and the level of competition continue to increase, individuals and businesses alike seek new and novel ways to track, analyze, and compare data to discover new ways to compete. There is also a need for tools that enable optimization of content, scalability with managing large volumes of content and data and predictability of future content performance.
Many platforms, YouTube™ being one example, that facilitate content postings and consumption typically enable persons and brands who use the system to see only select analytical results that apply to his or her individual channel. These platforms do make basic data available through an API. However, this is very basic data that does not allow adequate competitive comparisons nor does it necessarily help the content owner to compete, nor does it help the content owner become efficient with time. This restrictive view compromises the quality of any analysis or response actions.
Additionally, since these online platforms attract a significant number of viewers, advertisers, other than the persons who post the content, see these sites as having critical mass and may wish to place advertisements around the content as a promotional tactic. Given the vast range of content and highly variable quality that may be evident in such sites, advertisers need a method with which to identify and target high quality content channels that would be relevant for the placement of advertisements. What is clearly needed is a third-party service that can import data from Internet sites that enable posting of content, like videos, music, and other image-based, text-based or audio-based material, and can enrich that data, add to the data, and manipulate the data to create a more robust depiction. What is also needed are sophisticated tools for analyzing such data to determine the effectiveness of and opportunities with the posted content in accomplishing the purposes intended, and the ability to make changes to the promotional material in response to the enriched data.